Exploded View

by Sam McPheeters

  She fixed everyone’s position and zoomed in to see two officers carrying Mutty down the endless flights of stairs.

  “I’ll call back,” she said.

  She reviewed the maps. Drones had diagrammed floors 45 and 47, protocol to prevent a between-story ambush, she supposed. She saw the layout of the floor just above her and said, “Fuck it.”

  Terri ordered two of the uniformed officers back to the stairwell, everyone marching up one more flight, reentering an identical door, rounding several corners and emerging onto a spacious corporate elevator landing. After the murk of the forty-sixth floor, the vividly lit marble here stunned her eyes. Gang leaders appropriated the executive floors and private suites of every skyscraper. Through the back wall, they could see the view that had eluded them one floor below. These windows were spotless, perhaps cleaned by terrified gang associates who’d screwed up. She could see ambient gray helipads, illuminated by the three-quarter moon, the glinting Bonaventure Hotel, the distant Hollywood sign.

  Two OG SSKs emerged from some inner sanctum. Each was older, in his late twenties, dressed in Hawaiian shirts, Bermuda shorts, and sandals.

  “You fucking assholes think this is over?”

  The one on the left smirked and for an instant she saw herself drawing her gun, walking up and pressing it into the guy’s gawping mouth.

  “We’re coming back tomorrow,” she said to say something with some meat to it, to have what was rapidly melting into a fiasco not be in vain. “Tenfold. Batten down the hatches.” She pulled back toward the stairwell, the baffled officers eyeballing the OGs, then her, both gang executives smiling in amusement.

  On the eighteenth floor, she passed a trail of blood.

  Back in the gumball, she sat with the calm of total inertia. Having figured out what she’d been doing, the car had set its air conditioning to meat locker-cold, wanting to keep her awake as adrenaline levels crashed. Distant Bollywood music reverberated off the sides of buildings, sounding distorted and monstrous, the war drums of an enemy tribe. She opened up a Medical Status box, seeing Mutty’s ambulance as a distant pictogram on a flat plane, his vital signs visible in a little billboard of blips and pulse lines over the racing vehicle.

  She whispered to her car, having it drive ten blocks away so she could decompress in silence, PanOpts up and perched on her scalp. She looked out, seeing the street as it was. It was easy to pretend that as soon as she’d taken off the glasses, none of this had actually happened, that Mutty was on his way to get high somewhere. The earpiece chimed, tearing through the illusion’s thin tissue. She slid her shades down, descending into reality.

  Zack said, “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Any updates?”

  “He should be at Good Sam in a few minutes. I guess we’ll know more in, what? An hour maybe.”

  “An hour,” he sighed, sounding battle-weary.

  “Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “We got Mutty’s shooter, some shit-scared teen. That’s all. Wrong place, wrong time. So don’t blame yourself.”

  “Okay,” she said, thinking, Goddamn right I don’t.

  “Okay. Good. I guess, you know. Let’s keep each other posted, okay?” Another call dinged in her upper-right field of vision.

  “Yeah, let’s.” She switched calls, seeing an officer, a foot soldier, someone she’d glanced inside, in the scrum of invasion.

  “Detective?”

  “What’s up.”

  “We clocked the lobby macros, and it picked up one of the guys you were looking for.”

  “Oh yeah? Who?” she said, trying to remember when she had ordered any such list.

  “I just have the name,” he paused, reading from his own invisible list. “Dios Sarin,” he finally said with undue solemnity, as if the kid were a god of the underworld.

  “No shit,” she said, wondering if the night might be salvaged after all. “Clip his walk-ons and pass it along.”

  Three minutes later, she was watching Froggy cross the ground floor of 333 South Grand on December 29, walking with the jaunty swagger of a man who didn’t know it was his last day on earth. The lobby had been long-ago seeded with pinprick macros by warriors on the Wall, giving her a good view from every angle.

  Something caught her eye. She switched from single camera view and went into immersive, swooping down to eye level with Froggy. When she slowed him down to a slow-mo strut she saw he was carrying a blue-and-black gym bag. Something about this almost jarred her memory. She paused it, opened a side window, tagged Froggy’s byline, flipped him into the Basement, and watched his day in high-speed.

  His route followed the opposite emotional trajectory of Farrukh’s, his appointed rounds occurring on his own schedule, stopping at one notorious Third Street brothel for forty minutes, smoking weed as he exited, looking carefree. It was strange that she was still feeling sympathy for Froggy’s killer. He kept the gym bag on his person at all times, sometimes in hand, sometimes tightly strapped around his shoulder.

  Blanco called. She paused playback and quickly debated the most respectful form of communication, deciding audio only was probably appropriate.

  “Chief.”

  “So, the latest on this is that Mr. Posada has three wounds. One to his earlobe, superficial, a side entry and exit that looks decent, nothing vital. But the third shot was to his leg, and that clipped his femoral. He lost a lot of blood on the way down. The good news is he’s in surgical prep as we speak.”

  “Okay.” She looked out into the open box, the paused image of Froggy in the act of high-fiving some street personality.

  “His condition is very serious, Terri. I thought you should hear that from me.”

  “I understand.”

  “Listen. How you deal with this is your business. If you feel you need some time to yourself, no one’s going to challenge you. I’m just stating the obvious. But I want you to know that you shouldn’t blame yourself. This was an unforeseen occurrence in the line of duty.”

  “Sure,” she said, not knowing what to make of this.

  “Great. Let’s regroup tomorrow. In the meantime, go home.”

  “Okay.”

  She unpaused. Froggy continued down Main Street, stopping every thirty feet to shake hands and laugh and slap backs like he was running for city council or something. She sped the footage up. He grabbed a late lunch—or was it breakfast?—at a food truck on North Hill, caught a taxi on Alpine that took him up to a strip mall in Highland Park. Then he was back on the road, going east, to Alhambra, where he met with two teens, underlings, in a small park. She slowed this, their conversation taking on a serious cast but not enough so that she felt the need to piece together lip-synced audio. This was clearly a junior officer laying down the law to rookie foot soldiers. Then he was on the road again, having his car drive him just south of Lincoln Park, not far from the scene with Mr. Banghoo that felt like a million years ago.

  It was dark now, raining. He set out on foot, away from the park, feeling confident enough to cross through neutral gang territory, although Froggy’s affiliation and the neighborhood affiliations were labeled iffily in PanOpt’s database. He kept going, down to the freeway, striding the wrong way along the westbound shoulder, a gutsy thing to do with traffic zooming within three feet. He walked a half mile, his lively demeanor unchanged. Finally Froggy paused below the freeway sign, his face lit a slight green from its ambient glow. She paused and pulled up, realizing her apartment building was directly across the freeway from him, getting an old spooky feeling. Unpaused, Froggy seemed to smile directly at her as he tossed his gym bag with one overhand throw, like an oversized football, landing it on the balcony of the signage ledge.

  “Jesus.” She’d thought she’d recognized that bag.

  She called up the Vignes Detention Center and found herself facing its actual reception room. It was a minor flaw of PanOpt that cops had to interface the detention system the same way as the public. Everyone—fr
om family to lawyers—started in this same space, either in person or through the networks. There was no pretty splash page, no web room, no informative civic buffer zones, just a 3D smash cut into the outermost circle of Hell. Even with three separate containment doors before the visitation room, you could still hear the distant shrieks and buzzers. All that was missing was the overpowering stench of disinfectants. And sometimes the brain could conjure up this sharpest of phantom smells, so overwhelming was the experience. With the oversized checkerboard floor tiles, asylumish in their connotations, the place was somehow the city’s most real destination, regardless of if one went there physically or through a pair of glasses.

  She’d wondered why they’d made the experience so brutally authentic. After all, most of the people who came here remotely were just relatives. If someone came here via the Overlay to arrange a self-surrender, they’d probably give a long second thought to going on the lam. Maybe that was the idea; city, county, and state cells were all operating at close to triple capacity.

  “Evening, Detective,” a heavyset Corrections Officer said from behind a long steel countertop, seeing her as she saw him. His white neoprene gloves, made to cover forearms from splatters, had been rolled up over each wrist, so that he appeared to be wearing chunky bangle bracelets and dinner gloves.

  “Officer. Hey, I need to speak with DeShawn Mansaray. Can I get him in a Q&A room, or are those all taken?”

  “At midnight?” he laughed.

  “Hey, you never know.”

  She’d heard that overcrowding had gotten so bad they were making men sleep sitting up in the booths.

  “Yeah, sure. Assuming there’s time. This connected to that special 849?”

  “What 849? A custody release?”

  “This guy’s got some kind of guardian angel. He posted an hour ago. We’ve been getting calls all night about the kid. Paperwork should be wrapped up any time now.”

  “Calls from who?”

  “Mayor’s office. Between you and me, maybe higher. He’s got powerful friends.”

  In the distance, a muffled howl reverberated off a dozen different surfaces and she had to remind herself that she wasn’t actually here.

  “So. Can I see him?”

  “Lemme see what I can do. Come back in five?”

  He flicked a spot in the air between them and began typing on the bare countertop. Although he could no longer see or hear her, she said, “Great. Yeah.”

  Terri turned and took in the room. Only one other person sat in the far corner of the waiting area, some wayward sob story relative the CO must’ve let rot in place. Despite the soft car seat under her real body, she was more here than where she really was, and in this forced pause, she experienced a flash of emotional fragility and volatile hostility so acute that it registered as déjà vu. Powerful friends: this fucking night.

  Looking at this figure hunched over the black-and-white flooring triggered another free association. She opened a web box and then swapped scenes, so that the detention center lobby zoomed up into a small cubby in her upper-left-hand field of vision. In the parked police cruiser she sat in, she typed KANGAROO KORT in her desktop, and then the car interior did a clean dissolve and she was standing in a vastly larger waiting room, a space the general dimensions of an indoor soccer stadium, its floor tiles the same hideously giant checkerboard pattern as the detention center.

  She smiled that she’d made the connection about the flooring, that her powers of observation were still sharp. When had she last been here? She checked to make sure she wasn’t still logged in under some fake name, and that the webroom hadn’t detected that she’d arrived through PanOpts. Any cop lurking here was in for a world of abuse if they didn’t bother to conceal their identity.

  Terri muted the room’s audio, floated herself through a pair of twenty-foot-high swinging doors, and then she was in the Kortroom. Despite the chamber’s ornate absurdity—flaming torchlights, animated pirate flags fluttering from pikes, baroque woodwork curlicues reaching up to cathedral ceilings—this was largely a waiting room as well. To her left, hundreds of comically elongated pews reached off into the far distance, each filled with dozens of city cops from every division of every bureau. She’d heard that a third of the force had a Duplicado in the Kortroom dock.

  To her right was the Kort itself; the massive railing of the bar, a stage of cracked earth the square area of a professional basketball court, and then the immense raised bench, three stories high and jutting forward precariously. Behind this sat the judge, a twenty-foot kangaroo with steel daggers for teeth and a huge, flouncy powdered wig. As she watched, he thundered against some poor schlub who’d been stripped naked and tossed onto the stage. A crowd of onlookers hooted and hollered, although she knew there must be an exponentially larger audience without visible manifestation. Rumor had it that the LA Kortroom had overtaken the NYPD Kortroom in popularity last year.

  She called up a directory and scrolled down to her own name. A downturned neon arrow lit up in the distance, and as she floated over to view her own Dupe, she recognized some of the slack-jawed faces in the seats below; Johnny Gabling, Flaxy Chavez, Maureen Amaya, which seemed in especially poor taste, her dead of an aneurysm two years now.

  Terri located herself forty aisles back. She’d been dinged and subsequently sent here years and years ago, the wages of a brutality complaint by some speeded-out nobody whose roughing up she’d participated in. The guy had vanished not long after, and although the complaint had since expired, her Dupe had remained in place, sitting patiently, staring forward as if hypnotized, waiting for its day in Kort.

  She called up her Dupe’s byline, seeing that her comments list hadn’t been updated in months. She was glad to at least read her correct home address listed above her head.

  There’d been a stab of sadness, last time she’d been here, maybe a year ago, seeing herself still listed as living at the South Pasadena house.

  She heard the CO say, “Okay,” and when she swapped locations again she was in one of the detention center’s interrogation rooms, barely enough space for two people and a fold-down table. She’d forgotten how small it was. Did any cops still use these rooms in person?

  DeShawn slumped casually on the edge of a stool. He’d been given back his tan hoodie and supplied with corrections system disposables. Kids with his circumstances—young, non-violent, barely-felony shenanigans—usually showed a split lip or black eye by this time of night, but he looked no worse the wear for his captivity, and certainly not as tired as her. When he saw her in the space with him, he stiffened formally, an unexpected bit of respect.

  “Good evening, Officer,” he said. His voice was surprisingly soft and low. Only two ridiculous twin parts shaved into his scalp—perhaps in fashion, perhaps a throwback to some other stupid era in teen fashion—reminded her she was dealing with knucklehead number forty-six million.

  “I’m Officer Pastuszka,” she said. “Homicide.” When she saw that didn’t get a reaction, she said, “I heard you have friends up high. Wanna tell me how that came about?”

  “I don’t know. You work for the city? You meet people.”

  “You meet people through Caltrans?”

  He shrugged, a gesture so casual they might as well be making conversation in an airport bar over drinks.

  “Listen. I don’t even care. I need some information.”

  “Okay.”

  “I need to know …” She paused for a moment, trying to think through what she had to ask. “Sometimes people throw objects onto freeway sign ledges. You must’ve seen a lot of that, right?”

  He shrugged again. Was this politeness? Was he baiting her? For a moment she considered that she’d made a serious tactical mistake, not doing this in person. But then, if she’d taken the time to actually go down there, he probably would have been gone already.

  “You’re shrugging because, what, you agree with me?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Sure, like you’ve seen objec
ts thrown up there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Like what? What objects have you seen?”

  He squinted but didn’t squirm. “I dunno, like shoes. Maybe a ball or something.”

  “A ball? “

  “Yeah, like … I saw a baseball once.”

  “Any bags?”

  “Bags? Like, a shopping bag?”

  A weird lightheadedness came over her. When kids played dumb, it was usually because they actually were dumb. DeShawn knew something.

  “A gym bag.”

  “Naw. Maybe,” he said with a sly little smile.

  “What I need to know is, is there any way for anyone to get up there if they don’t work for Caltrans? If they needed to retrieve a bag?”

  “What would I know about that?” Now there was a snicker, at first muffled by his fist, then straight at her. Her eyes narrowed. Denied the prerogatives of close personal contact, officer standing over perp, she could only try to intimidate.

  “Do you realize I’m the person that can keep you in this dungeon?” she said, a lie. “You wanna sleep in a box tonight? Hey!”

  DeShawn was laughing now, a full-throated guffaw that spilled into tearful snorts.

  “Hey!” she was yelling, scaring herself, thinking irrationally that she would be waking the cellblock.

  “Hey! Hey!”

  She blinked, suddenly back in the reception room.

  “What?”

  “Too bad,” the CO said curtly. “Paperwork’s up. He’s getting sprung.”

  “Says who? They don’t pull interrogations like this! I’m in an open murder that …”

  “Yeah, I’ll say. It just came down. Mutty died, ten minutes ago. Word is, you’re to thank. So congrats.” He ended the call, and she was back in the cooling car on an empty street corner.

  Terri had the car screech out as she pulled up a fat, three-dimensional Caltrans logo, finding and selecting the green-and-blue directory. Now was not the time to mourn. In the past, she’d found grief possible to defer, having done it twice, once in tenth grade, the afternoon her father died, and then years later, as an adult, during those long shifts in the days and weeks after her dog Congo had expired in her arms. She’d hold off thinking about it until she actually had time to dwell on it, accepting that the grief would engulf her only at that point.